3. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time
low. In other words, corporate profits are at an
all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of
their revenue to employees than they ever have. There are lots of
reasons for this, many of which are not the fault of the
corporations. (It's a global economy now, and 2-3 billion new
low-cost employees in China, India, et al, have recently entered
the global workforce. This is putting pressure on wages the world
over.)

4. Income and wealth inequality in the US economy is near
an all-time high: The owners of the country's assets
(capital) are winning, everyone else (labor) is losing.

Three charts illustrate this:

The top earners are capturing a higher share of the
national income than they have anytime since the 1920s:

CEO pay and corporate profits have skyrocketed in the
past 20 years, "production worker" pay has risen 4%.

After adjusting for inflation, average earnings haven't
increased in 50 years.

It's worth noting that the US has been in a similar situation
before: At the end of the "Roaring '20s," just before the start
of the Great Depression. (See some of the charts above).

It took the country 15-20 years to pull out of that slump and fix
the imbalances. But by the mid-1950s, employment, corporate
profits, wages, and inequality had all returned to more normal
levels. And the country enjoyed a couple of decades of relatively
well-balanced prosperity. But now, everything's out of whack
again.

Importantly, the inequality that has developed in the economy
over the past couple of decades is not just a moral issue. It's a
practical one. It is, as sociologists might say,
"de-stabilizing." It leads directly to the sort of social unrest
that we're seeing right now.